The Home Office is not fit for purpose, DJ’s murder by asylum seeker comes from not caring who we let into country
WHY is our immigration system so broken? I can already hear the response from Home Office officials and others: “Who says it is?”
Well let me reply with just one case.
Take the example of Lawangeen Abdulrahimzai, whose story was reported by The Sun yesterday.
This man left Afghanistan in 2015 and ended up in Serbia, where he gunned down two fellow Afghans with an assault rifle.
It seemed that they were having a fall-out about people trafficking.
Wanted by the Serbian authorities, where did Mr Abdulrahimzai head to next?
Well, it seems he was wanted in Italy on drug charges.
He also had his application for asylum turned down in Norway.
So, of course, he headed to Britain.
A country which the pro-illegal immigration lobby pretends is not at all known as a soft touch.
He arrived here by ferry in 2019.
And not on one of the illegal boats that now pour across the Channel, but by one of the normal legal ferry routes.
He arrived into the UK with no papers and, though he was 18 years old at the time, he pretended to be 14.
You may remember that MPs and others some years ago decided that it was racist and demeaning to question the age of any arrival.
Although 20 years ago even the Labour government accepted that it was legitimate to test someone’s age by looking at their teeth, for instance, in the past decade a Conservative MP who suggested this was smeared and shouted down.
So Britain accepted the man was a boy, put him into foster care and into a school in Bournemouth, where he terrorised and beat up the actual children in the school.
Apparently none of this brought Abdulrahimzai to the attention of the authorities.
In order for him to do this, he had to stab local Bournemouth DJ Thomas Roberts to death last March, in a row in the street over a scooter.
Only then did the authorities start to take an interest in him and the five separate identities that he turned out to have lived under since 2015.
How can such a situation have happened?
Only because our Border Force and Home Office are not fit for purpose.
While most people would expect them to be on top of cases like this, they are, in fact, overwhelmed by them.
Not just incompetent
And not just because they are incompetent — though that is certainly part of it.
It is because there are people in the system who do not mind this madness and absolutely nobody who will ever pay a price for it.
We know the internal opposition that consecutive Home Secretaries, not least Priti Patel, have faced when they have tried to crack down on rule-breakers.
Whenever a Home Secretary tries to get tough on people who abuse the system, they get huge push-back not just from the pro-illegal migration lobby, but from people within the system.
It is civil servants and others who object and refuse to do their jobs and lobby against their own bosses.
And one result of this is that nobody will take responsibility when things go wrong, as they so often do.
The authorities in Bournemouth say they had no option but to treat Abdulrahimzai as a child because he said he was one. Fine.
I want to know who made that decision to allow him to stay in the country.
I want to know which official ticked off the permission for him to stay.
Who allowed him to be sent to a school?
Who allowed him to terrorise the kids?
Who didn’t check his identity or which other countries had arrest warrants out for him?
Who didn’t bother to do their job?
If we had answers to questions like these then things might change.
If people in the system were held accountable then things might be different. But they never are.
We also discovered this week that dozens of people who are alleged to be child migrants have been kidnapped by gangs from a Brighton hotel.
A whistleblower has said the inhabitants have been abducted off the street outside and bundled into cars.
The people traffickers and criminal networks who are doing this are known about but not stopped.
As with everything else, when this scandal becomes better known, various people will admit a string of errors.
But will anyone be held accountable for this wholly preventable horror?
Again, I would bet not. Because the system is so broken. And it’s broken because there is no accountability.
From the moment people are allowed into this country — whether they come by legal boat or illegal boat — everything is done to pretend the problem away.
The Government and other officials hope we don’t notice the lawlessness of people breaking into our country.
And they hope we won’t notice everything that comes from that.
The violence. The trafficking. The abuse. The crime. All come from the first mistake: Not caring who comes into our country in the first place.
Ignore that little “detail” and everything else can follow.
Want lion’s share of publicity? Head out like Kylie
THE Kardashians live for one reason: To get publicity and make money off it.
So I wasn’t surprised at the latest stunt by one of the ever-mutating tribe.
Kylie Jenner grabbed the headlines on Monday when she turned up to Paris Fashion Week wearing what looked like the head of a lion.
Everyone promptly went nuts, which brought Kylie precisely the publicity she wanted.
She pointed out that the ultra-realistic-looking lion head was fake and that no animals were harmed.
But by then all of social media was talking about her and debating the rights and wrongs of wearing the garment.
So everybody else got that little bit dumber and Kylie got the media attention she craves.
A roaring success for her.
IT’S not always easy to tell when there is a rail strike.
When there is, and the rail companies hold the country to ransom, nothing moves.
But even on the days when the train workers aren’t on strike it’s not 100 per cent clear whether they are or not.
In recent years, I’ve stood on many a forlorn platform waiting as train after train is cancelled.
Then if one does come along, you have the pleasure of cramming on to it, standing for most of your journey or sitting on the floor.
All these pleasures are brought to you by one of the most overpriced railway services in the world.
Now new data shows that the four weeks leading to January 7 saw the least reliable rail services since the data started being collected in 2014.
The rail companies responded by blaming not just the strikes but the pandemic.
Well, blaming Covid for everything is so 2020. This is 2023, guys.
But I suppose the rail companies are late to that fact, as they are for everything else.
Listen to her, Labour
LABOUR MP Rosie Duffield is a hero.
And Harry Potter author JK Rowling agrees. And she should know.
In recent years, the MP for Canterbury has increased her majority in her seat. But she is a pariah in her party.
Why? Because Ms Duffield takes a view most sensible people do.
Which is that, for instance, a man who thinks he is a woman should not be allowed in a woman’s changing room. Controversial, eh?
Well it is among the loony left, who shout down Duffield when she makes her points.
Last week in the House of Commons, male Labour MPs Ben Bradshaw and Lloyd Russell-Moyle tried to silence Duffield.
As Rowling pointed out this week, Duffield is “an ex-assistant teacher, single mother and survivor of domestic abuse”.
She also won Labour a seat the party thought was unwinnable.
Starmer’s party has a clear choice.
Either they go the way of mad bullies like Bradshaw and Russell-Moyle, or they can listen to women.
Not least women in their own party.
Return us too taxing
NADHIM ZAHAWI may have some explaining to do over his tax situation.
It seems that the Tory party chairman got into a bit of a confusion over his personal finances.
Happily, they were resolved last year while he was, er, Chancellor of the Exchequer.
Apparently HMRC came to the conclusion Zahawi was “careless and not deliberate” in the errors he made.
But here’s a suggestion.
If even a Chancellor can make accidental errors in his personal finances, is it possible that the whole thing is too unclear and complicated in the first place?
As self-employed people get ready to send in their end of year tax-returns, I’d say so.
But I wish people would realise what that means. Instead of playing politics over Zahawi, why can’t the tax situation be made clearer and easier for everyone?